My Friend Who Walked Like A Flamingo In Her Spare Time

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My Friend Who Walked Like A Flamingo In Her Spare Time

In seventh or eighth grade my best friend and I began to spend time with a girl named Annette who was way nerdier than we were. We agreed that even though we liked her and she was funny and smart that nerding out like Annette did, just being basically willing at any moment to make cartoonish noises or walk like a flamingo down the hallway was probably not for us. We wanted more for ourselves.

Despite my desire to present myself as a player on the small part of the world stage I occupied, I could not resist Annette’s sense of humor and utter unwillingness to be obsessed with being hot or socially desirable. Also, she wasn’t ugly or anything, and I wasn’t amazing looking, it was just that I read magazines and watched movies and wanted things in them, experiences, and actual items, and she didn’t even really know about magazines and she only liked movies with dragons or cartoon animals. In a way she was pure. 

She was also a born-again Christian. This cannot be ignored and is maybe everything.

Her mother was deeply religious. I’m pretty sure Annette hated her. I remember going to her house once and Annette crying and saying her mother was just so terrible she couldn’t stand it. This wasn’t just teenage stuff, I mean, I had problems with my mom at this time but I wouldn’t say the world or probably anyone would look at my mother and say “Holy shit, how do you even DEAL.” Whereas Annette’s mom was truly beyond belief, whiny, mean, spiteful, just absolutely committed to being the most sour, unpleasant and boring person ever. Annette had younger sisters and Annette’s mother seemed to truly care nothing about Annette and to be obsessed with them. Her mother essentially wanted Annette to live for her little sisters. She wasn’t even supposed to say no to them. It was creepy. 

Annette’s mother hated me and most parents liked me, but I just couldn’t put on my people-pleasing song and dance for her. I felt I needed to set an example for Annette.

I am sure I suggested on more than one occasion to Annette that maybe since her mother kind of sucked maybe she herself didn’t need to be so into Jesus, because honestly, was that really her thing? Wasn’t that just her mom’s trip, and why did she have to go along with that? But Annette insisted that she loved Jesus all on her own, and I was like, Ok, fair enough, I won’t insist on it.  That said, her nerdiness probably wasn’t actually pure, there was surely some sort of pride in virginity behind it.  If you want to avoid sex, walking like a flamingo for fun in public is probably a good way to do it. You don’t have to come out and say “My body is my own until marriage” but the result is the same.

Despite me being a heavily socially aspirational person and her being the opposite, as middle school became high school and as graduation came closer I found that I still spent a lot of time in her company laughing at her jokes and getting her to laugh at mine. Near the very end of our time together at our extremely small featureless rural high school next to a cow pasture and across the street from a development heavy on 70s era Tudor, I would in fact find myself in a situation where nearly everyone I knew, even my close friends, had turned on me. There was a particular incident where I went running out of a class crying —  it was really pretty bad — anyway any number of people who were actually my friends could’ve come out after me but none of them did except for Annette. She was guileless and concerned and I probably didn’t know a person in the world at that time able to display those qualities. 

But even as I sobbed and she consoled me I’m sure some not-small part of me was looking at her and thinking “Oh, Annette! What are you wearing?”

Last time I wrote about a refusal to let bygones be bygones.